Every morning he began to practise at eight o’clock, and continued till eleven.  The piano, a Steinway in a hundred Steinways, was in the further of the two drawing-rooms.  He would go into the room smoking a cigarette, and when he had thrown away the cigarette I would leave him.  And as soon as I had closed the door the first notes would resound, slow and solemn, of the five-finger exercises with which he invariably commenced his studies.  That morning, as often, I sat writing in the enclosed garden.  I always wrote in pencil on my knee.  The windows of the drawing-room were wide open, and Diaz’ music filled the garden.  The sheer beauty of his tone was such that to hear him strike even an isolated note gave pleasure.  He created beauty all the time.  His five-finger exercises were lovely patterns of sound woven with exact and awful deliberation.  It seemed impossible that these should be the same bald and meaningless inventions which I had been wont to repeat.  They were transformed.  They were music.  The material in which he built them was music itself, enchanting the ear as much by the quality of the tone as by the impeccable elegance of the form.  To hear Diaz play a scale, to catch that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born—­this was to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art.  I used to believe that nothing could surpass the beauty of a scale, until Diaz, after writing formal patterns in the still air innumerably, and hypnotizing me with that sorcery, would pass suddenly to the repetition of fragments of Bach.  And then I knew that hitherto he had only been trying to be more purely and severely mechanical than a machine, and that now the interpreter was at work.  I have heard him repeat a passage fifty times—­and so slowly!—­and each rendering seemed more beautiful than the last; and it was more beautiful than the last.  He would extract the final drop of beauty from the most beautiful things in the world.  Washed, drenched in this circumambient ether of beauty, I wrote my verse.  Perhaps it may appear almost a sacrilege that I should have used the practising of a Diaz as a background for my own creative activity.  I often thought so.  But when one has but gold, one must put it to lowly use.  So I wrote, and he passed from Bach to Chopin.

Usually he would come out into the garden for five minutes at half-past nine to smoke a cigarette, but that morning it had struck ten before the music ceased.  I saw him.  He walked absent-minded along the terrace in the strange silence that had succeeded.  He was wearing his riding-breeches, for we habitually rode at eleven.  And that morning I did not hide my work when he came.  It was, in fact, finished; the time had arrived to disclose it.  He stopped in front of me in the sunlight, utterly preoccupied with himself and his labours.  He had the rapt look on his face which results from the terrible mental and spiritual strain of practising as he practised.